Saturday, 24 August 2013

Heroes and villains – a modern definition

Whistleblowers
are vilified or intimidated while the wrongs and the wrongdoers that they
expose go uninvestigated

Paul Vallely Independent/UK 25 August, 2013

It takes a lot to overshadow the news
that the biggest leaker of military secrets in American history has just been
jailed for 35 years – a sentence some regard as outrageous and others as so
lenient it constitutes a tacit rebuke to the US government for prosecuting
Private Bradley Manning, the soldier responsible for the leaks, instead of
lauding the whistleblower for exposing human rights abuses by the American
military.

But the world went to
bed on Thursday calling the defendant Bradley, and on Friday morning learned
that Manning gender dysphoria and from now on wanted to be considered a woman
named Chelsea. (The Independent on Sunday uses Manning's preferred
feminine pronouns.)

The self-righteousness and self-delusion
about much of the comment was an apt metaphor for a more profound muddle. How,
in all the current preoccupation with secrets and leaks, does society achieve a
proper balance between the rights of the individual and the obligation of the
government to ensure national security?

Hero or zero computations do not work in
these cases. Much of what Manning did was a global public service, drawing
attention to morally questionable US behaviour in Iraq, Afghanistan and
elsewhere. Thanks to her, we have evidence of American troops killing women and
children, and then calling in an airstrike to destroy the evidence. We know the
US military failed to investigate reports of torture and murder by Iraqi police
– and of the "black unit" which carried out 373 extrajudicial
assassinations of Taliban sympathisers in Afghanistan. We know the US pressured
Spain to scale back its investigations into torture at Guantanamo Bay. And we
know that British officials let the US take cluster bombs through the UK and
hid this from Parliament.

But she also passed to WikiLeaks a mind-boggling
760,000 classified documents that included the names of US informants in Iraq
and Afghanistan, which we know al-Qa'ida then scrutinised. That was why US
prosecutors sought to have Manning convicted of "aiding the enemy" –
which carries the death penalty. Such was the vindictiveness in the treatment
of Manning, who was held in solitary confinement for almost a year, that the
judge reduced her sentence. But even if the US authorities got the balance
wrong, there was certainly a judgement to make.

The same is true of
Edward Snowden, the IT contractor with the US National Security Agency who
leaked thousands of US secrets to The Guardian journalist Glenn
Greenwald. Snowden blew the whistle on the fact that US secret agents have for
years logged the details of nearly every American telephone call and email –
and that the NSA's British GCHQ intercepts those emails that American spooks
are forbidden by US law from inspecting.

That has instituted a highly desirable
debate about the penetration of the modern surveillance state in ordinary
lives. But there is a downside to Snowden. Snowden fled first to China, where he revealed
that US intelligence had hacked into Beijing's computers, and then to Russia,
where he has sought political asylum, and bizarrely called the Putin regime a
defender of human rights. The man who started out claiming he was trying to
protect US citizens now appears to be intent on the opposite.

Miranda claimed not to know what he was
carrying – a declaration that would have prevented his boarding any tourist
flight. It seems clear that the police held him under the wrong legislation.
But again, to detain and question someone the police suspect to be carrying
data that could compromise British national security is not unreasonable.
Greenwald's retaliatory threat that he will publish more documents on England's
spies to make them "sorry for what they did", reinforces
rather than diminishes
the police case.

Manning was a soldier who did her
military duty until she felt the call of a higher moral duty to protest against
abuses by the army of which she was a part.
Snowden's motives look altogether murkier, and journalists exploiting
them have a duty to take additional care in handling the material he is
leaking. As to the US authorities, they
need to ask why a whistleblower was given 35 years when the offenders whose
wrongs she disclosed are still unprosecuted, and even feted as hero war
veterans.

Paul Vallely is visiting professor of
public ethics and media at the University of Chester[Abridged]

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About Me

I am not an academic. I have been a commercial beekeeper in New Zealand for most of my working life, except for four years in detention as a conscientious objector during WW2. Those years were particularly formative for me. I have retained my horror of war and the suffering still being caused by armed conflict and violence in so many places. My convictions have been nurtured by my Methodist church connection, though my pacifism has been deplored by some good people.

Expect no slick answers here; I am still a searcher myself. How can a just and peaceful society develop from this chaos, and what are the obstacles in the way?

Most of the articles posted here are from other sources. I look for writers, wherever they can be found, who can throw light on what is happening in our world. If you would like to learn a little more about myself, please read this biographical interview series conducted by my granddaughter, Kyla.